25 Creating Social Creativity: Integrative Transdisciplinarity and the Epistemology of Complexity Alfonso Montuori

Creating Social Creativity: Integrative Transdisciplinarity… 

---

412
excavation and explication is increasingly necessary as we encounter a plural-
ity of approaches to creativity research originating in a variety of disciplines. 
Weisberg’s and Runco’s contributions provide us with a good example of a 
strategy of simplification (Morin, 2008a, 2008b). The strategy of simplification 
involves reduction and disjunction: 
reduction to what is considered to be 
essential (the focus on an “actual mechanism,” in Runco’s case) and 
disjunc-
tion, or separation from the unnecessary influences or unnecessary effects, in 
this case particularly anything considered “social.”
My own approach goes in the other direction of disciplinary specialization. 
It is a strategy of complexity that embraces transdisciplinarity. Transdisciplinarity 
is an emerging approach to inquiry, and there are already emerging schools 
with quite different approaches (Augsburg, 
2014
; Klein, 
2004
; Martin, 
2017
), 
many of which involve tackling so-called “wicked problems” with research 
teams. I refer to my specific approach as 
Integrative Transdisciplinarity (Montuori, 
2010
, 
2013a
; Montuori & Donnelly, 
2016
), which focuses more on how 
researchers and practitioners, or scholar-practitioners (Donnelly, 
2016
), can 
make sense of the enormous amount of research scattered in different disci-
plines and sub-disciplines to address issues whose complexity cannot restrict 
them to one discipline. Integrative Transdisciplinarity does not reject disciplin-
ary specialization but complements it. It seeks to connect and contextualize 
knowledge from a plurality of specialized sources pertinent to an issue at hand.
Along with scholars who specialize, we also need scholars who “weave 
together” what exists within disciplines, as well as related works in other dis-
ciplines, so that it can be applied to real world issues. Integrative 
Transdisciplinarity is therefore a form of “scholarship of integration” (Boyer, 
Moser, Ream, & Braxton, 
2015
). This weaving together also requires an 
exploration the underlying assumptions of the perspectives informing any 
research project, as well as the range of possible perspectives and frameworks 
with which any topic might be approached. I call this the “meta- paradigmatic” 
dimension of Integrative Transdisciplinarity. The strategy of simplification 
seeks to 
extricate correlates, as Runco puts it, whereas Integrative 
Transdisciplinarity sees creativity as a systemic, distributed, networked pro-
cess and actively explores context and connections (Csikszentmihalyi, 
2015
; 
Glăveanu, 
2014a
, 
2014b
). This does not mean a rejection or a downplaying 
of the individual and a dismissing of genius and creativity for instance, in 
favor of a “social” view, where “social” is viewed as opposite and antagonistic 
to individual. It is rather an attempt to contextualize and connect creativity at 
all levels of inquiry, whether we are speaking of a network of ideas or of per-
sonality characteristics or relationships or the relation between all three 
(Montuori & Purser, 
1999a
).